Hunger Reads: Hand Gestures You Should Know Before Tonight's Debate and A Look Into Obama's Campaign Hard Drive

So you’re stuck in line at Chipotle, bored, behind on your news-reading—yet not exactly jonesing for another rehash of the headlines. Enter the Hunger Reads, our daily compendium of the political stories we think you’ll actually enjoy reading. (At least more than reading the take-out menu over and over.)

Mr. Obama uses a more controlled style than Mr. Romney does. While the force of his movements can prompt the viewer to support the argument put forth, controlled movements can also make the viewer feel that the path suggested would not be easy.

Mr. Romney’s body language is generally more free-flowing than Mr. Obama’s. Such movements can be infectious, encouraging the viewer to join with the speaker.

Reed represents an approach to technology that distinguishes the Obama campaign from its counterpart in Boston. Whereas Romney has outsourced much of his data-focused operations, this time around Team Obama—which has been advised by representatives from Google and Facebook, according to > Bloomberg Businessweek—is trying to emulate a start-up atmosphere in hopes of fostering the kind of innovation rarely associated with stuffy political shops. Fewer consultants, more in-house geeks.
"[They’ve] taken this sort of data-driven mentality and expanded it across the entire campaign," says Josh Hendler, the former director of technology at the Democratic National Committee, who’s staying on the sidelines in 2012. Dashboard, for instance, mimics some of the gaming tactics that Threadless pioneered. Volunteers can see their personal statistics updated in real time—money raised, calls attempted, conversations held, one-on-one meetings convened. A scoreboard allows volunteers to see how they stack up against their peers. The campaign, in turn, can use this data to gauge which field offices are hitting their goals and which ones aren’t.

As the campaign becomes ever more absorbed in all things digital, its real-world networks have shifted accordingly. One of Reed’s first moves as CTO was to fly with Slaby to San Francisco, where they held an information session for techies at Zeitgeist, a popular Mission District beer garden. In February, OFA unveiled a new satellite technology office in the city’s ultra-wired SoMa neighborhood, the first of a handful of such offices slated to open across the country.

Romney’s Boston campaign operation, by contrast, had no software engineers on staff until well after the end of the primary season, according to a Mother Jones analysis of payroll data provided to the FEC. Its forays into the digital world have caught attention mostly for their miscues, like an iPhone app that featured a misspelled "America." But the campaign has quietly begun tackling the same challenges faced by OFA, only with a twist. Slate’s Sasha Issenberg reported in July that the campaign had recently hired eggheads from places like Google Analytics and Apple in an attempt to reverse engineer the Obama campaign’s strategy. Hence Team Obama’s shroud of secrecy around its digital ops.

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